


Team Jiraiya

by rilina



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-22
Updated: 2006-05-22
Packaged: 2017-10-03 08:42:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rilina/pseuds/rilina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Konoha usually forgets that Jiraiya has had four students, not two.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Team Jiraiya

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for volume 11, but only for who Jiraiya actually is!

Konoha usually forgets that Jiraiya has had four students, not two. Everyone knows Yondaime and Naruto, linked forever by a demon and a seal, but few recall the other two children who used to tramp in Jiraiya's wake, pretending to be far older than their ages as genins have done for time immemorial.

Jiraiya doesn't think of those two students often—he's more haunted by the living than the dead—but he remembers them with perfect clarity. Their names, their faces, their endless squabbles with each other and him, their haste to grow up. Their shaky voices after their first kills. Their inexplicable pride in him as their teacher. Unlike Yondaime, who always promised to become one of Konoha's greatest, they were never anything exceptional, but they were still Jiraiya's brats.

Like so many others of their generation, they fell during the war. Their routine patrol stumbled into an enemy trap; in the ensuing chaos, not one shinobi on their team could manage the counter to the enemy's new jutsu. With six seals and a surge of chakra, three lives were snuffed out. The fourth team member survived only because the enemy had bigger fish to fry. By the time Jiraiya returned from his own S-ranked mission, their names had already been scratched on the cenotaph without fanfare. In those days, there was never much time for ceremony.

The characters of their names are almost illegible now, worn away by nineteen of Konoha's harsh winters.

There are at least four methods of countering the jutsu that killed them. Jiraiya knows them all. The techniques are not particularly advanced ones; any chuunin could master them, and Jiraiya could have have easily passed them on before his team was split up during one of the war's frequent reorganizations. But Jiraiya respects his students' memories too much to take their deaths on himself. They may not have been geniuses, but they weren't fools. They must have guessed that they would never live to see old age, but they still chose to put on their hitae-ites every morning. And every shinobi knows that there will always be a jutsu that you don't know.

Jiraiya honors the choices of the dead by letting them go.


End file.
